This is Why We Long for Community 👣 Even When We Don’t Realise It

How do we find ways of living and working that work for all of life?

Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfilment.

— John Donohue

As a child, I understood little of what grown-ups called ‘normal’. As a young adult, I tried to look like I had it all figured out, but I really had no idea what I was doing, let alone why I was doing it.

Deep down, I knew I wasn’t living for anything I genuinely cared for, but only after I gathered the courage to admit this did I start seeing new doors.

Fueled by a longing for truth, a dive into money, experiments with different ways of living, giving, and working, and an experiment in living, travelling and working without money, a thread started weaving into my ‘why’: community.

Survival in a world of abundance

Many of us in the Western world are working harder and harder to pay for the rising costs of an economy that doesn’t know what ’enough’ means. More and more of us feel that the treadmill we’re on isn’t logical, healthy or productive.

And money is not to blame.

Like any instrument, the creation and use of money reflect collective and individual convictions. Following this, I’ve come to see all of our current crises (ecological, economic, societal, political, and mental) as a logical consequence of a single mis-take on what we are and what we’re surrounded by.

Much of our world is unconsciously built on the following two lies:

😱 There isn’t enough
😱 We aren’t enough

This constant and collective sense of lack underlies all of our mysery, separating us from each other, the Earth, and the truth—and driving us into a so-called positive, never-ending and incredibly destructive strife for economic growth.

There is enough,

more for you is not less for me (we only need to look around us to see the miraculous abundance that is life)

and we are enough.

Yet, in a way, we’re not.

Debunking independence

We don’t live and act independently from the life around us; we’re part of an incredible, interconnected being, and we can thrive only when life around us thrives.

So this is my take now: the crises of our time are not ecological, economic or social, but a simple call to reconnect to the truth of our shared one existence.

Miki Kashtan, who calls herself a “practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all”, said it beautifully in a podcast, which I link to at the bottom of this post:

‘That we live as individuals makes us extremely weak. Extremely weak in terms of being able to create a good life. Sure, if we have enough privilege, we can compensate for that weakness by buying and buying and buying things and relationships and services, but it doesn’t actually give us rootedness, care, community, wholeness, reverence for life — all the things that make for a real experience of aliveness and flow.’

Debunking separation

Ultimately, work on self is inseparable from work in the world. Each mirrors the other; each is a vehicle for the other. When we change ourselves, our values and actions change as well. When we do work in the world, internal issues arise that we must face or be rendered ineffective.

— Charles Eisenstein

Building strong, resilient, trustful communities based on connection and solidarity is our best bet to save ourselves as a species, healing the outside world and the inside world in parallel.

— Tim Riedel

Spiritually speaking, any search for certainty, security and safety is futile. These ‘things’ are in us, and that’s the only place we’ll ultimately find them. Yet we’re here, on Earth, and I feel that living and working in strong, resilient, and trustful communities based on connection and solidarity is an essential ingredient in healing our collective sense of separation, and with it, the planet.

I sometimes hear people advocating a return to a previous, more communal way of life, but I believe we need—and yearn for—a way of living and working together that we have yet to experience.

Founding call

I feel called to found a full-time community that will serve as a training ground and a model for a healthy, connected, and powerful way of living together—with ourselves, each other, and Earth.

I feel this call in every cell, and I know I’m not the only one. More and more people are longing and searching for a life that feels like life, desiring to be a building block for a world that thrives rather than survives.

And I’m setting a high bar for this community, not out of arrogance but out of desire. I have no illusions when it comes to having the answers and knowing it all, but this Miracle Project has one crucial thing going for it: a positively stubborn knowing that things are not just the way they are 🚀.

This Miracle Project?

Anyone serious about real, positive change is in the business of co-creating miracles on Earth. This project won’t be the first, and it won't the last.

It’s a Miracle Project, one of many.

Learn more:

• A recipe book for prototyping new ways of living, working, and giving.
• A first blueprint for Miracle Project’s key operational principles.
• A source of inspiration for anyone who longs to reinvent how we organise ourselves around co-creating a more beautiful world.

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Cover photo background: Claudel Rheault
Cover photo illustration: Raymundo